As part of the Ubuntu App Developer Week, I just ran a live on-air session on how to internationalize your Ubuntu apps. Some of the participants on the live chat asked me if I could share the slides somewhere online.

So here they are for your viewing pleasure :) If you’ve got any questions on i18n or in Ubuntu app development in general, feel free to ask in the comments or ping me (dpm) on IRC.

After reading the Ubuntu App Showdown subreddit, getting a few pings on G+ and IRC, it seems there are some showdown participants concerned about whether their app made it on time for the contest.

So here’s a quick heads up: don’t worry, if your app was submitted to MyApps on time, and complied with the contest requirements, it made it to the contest. If some of the requirements were not met, we’ve probably contactedyou and given you a chance to meet them, as we appreciate the hard work you’ve put these last 3 weeks, and we want you to get in.

Some of you have noticed there is a Trello board the Ubuntu App Review Board and their contributors have been using to track progress on app reviews. Some of the apps are still not in there simply because of the overwhelmingly positive response and the work it takes to process the about 150 contest submissions we got. About 90% of them are valid, and while it might take us a bit more than expected to process them, it is a very pleasant problem to have, to be honestRead more

The way it works is simple and the rules are well documented, so I won’t go into the details: in short, you’ve got 3 weeks to create a new app, submit it to MyApps and you can win awesome prizes, including 2 laptops from system76 and a many many Nokia N9 smartphones from the Qt project. So if you’ve always wanted to start application development in Ubuntu, that’s a unique opportunity!

So here’s a reminder that the Ubuntu App Showdown is officially starting today, and you’ve got until the 9th July 2012 to create and submit a cool app according to the rules.

Starting also today, we’ve got a series of app developer workshops to help you get started with writing your app. Coming up:

I’m personally very excited about the contest. It’s been great to see lots of questions and positive reactions over the weekend and I’m really looking forward to see lots of awesome apps coming into the Ubuntu Software Centre!

I’m thrilled to announce the launch of a significant milestone in the ongoing effort of making Ubuntu a target for app developers: the new Ubuntu App Developer site.

Developer.ubuntu.com should now be the central point of reference for any topics related to application development. From creation to publication: porting, sharing, contributing, finding information… a site that should grow organically to provide the tools, share the knowledge and act as the springboard to foster app proliferation and developer community growth in this exciting area.

Embracing the concept that for sustainable business development and wider adoption Ubuntu should provide the ability to purchase apps as well as to install open source software for free, the site has been developed with that exact idea in mind. In that regard, developer.ubuntu.com has been built upon the foundations of existing tools such as the Ubuntu Software Centre and My Apps to offer a unified and consistent journey for both open-source, non-commercial and commercial app authors.

A quick walk through the App Developer site

All sections of the site have been carefully designed upon research and user testing to provide a simple yet intuitive journey to app developers, from software creation to publication and distribution in the Ubuntu Software Centre. Here’s a quick guide:

Get started – an introduction to the recommended tools and the workflow for Ubuntu app development, including a video to kickstart new developers in less than five minutes.

Resources – a growing directory of resources to support app development in Ubuntu: reference documentation, guides, tutorials and more.

Publish – a simple guide to app publication in the Ubuntu Software Centre, including an extensive FAQ on how to publish commercial applications.

Community – the place to get involved, share and actively participate within a network of like-minded developers, including the app developer blog.

My Apps – an online tool to enable app developers go straight from a finished app to the Software Centre, making publication a seamless process.

Big thanks

In this project I’ve had the privilege of working with the Web Design team, who essentially made the site happen. It’s been a fun ride, and they’ve produced a truly stunning result in a very tight schedule. To them, and to many Canonicalers and other members of the Ubuntu family go the thanks for making developer.ubuntu.com possible.

Next steps

This is just the beginning. For all its current awesomeness, we are aware that the site needs to pass the test of a wider audience, adapt to their needs, and grow. Expect more developer.ubuntu.com discussions at the next Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando, Florida, where any community member can participate and contribute to the discussion of the future plans for the site.

In the meantime, there are two easy ways in which you can already start participating:

Getting A Grip on Your Apps: Multitouch on GTK apps using Libgrip

In his session, Jussi talked about one of the most interesting technologies where Ubuntu is leading the way in the open source world: multitouch. Walking the audience through the Grip Tutorial, he described how to add gesture support to existing applications based on GTK+ 3. He chose to focus on the higher layer of the uTouch stack, where he explained the concepts on which libgrip, the gesture library, is built upon, such as device types and subscriptions. After having explored in detail the code examples, he then revealed that in Oneiric Eye Of GNOME and Evince, Ubuntu’s default image viewer and default PDF reader, will be gesture-enabled.

Creating a Google Docs Lens

Neil introduced his session explaining the background behind Lenses: a re-architecture effort of the now superseded Places concept to make them more powerful, provide more features and make it easier to add features through a re-engineered API. Lenses create its own instance, add categories, filters and leave the searching to Scopes. The Lenses/Scopes pairs are purely requests for data, independent of the type of UI, and being provided by the libunity library, they can be written in any of the programming languages supported by GObject Introspection (Python, Javascript, C/C++, Vala, etc.). To illustrate all of this concepts, Neil devoted the rest of the session to a real example of creating a Lens for Google Docs.

Practical Ubuntu One Files Integration

Another hands-on session from Michael, with a real world example on how to supercharge apps with cloud support. Using his experience in integrating the Ubuntu One Files API to Deja Dup, the default backup application in Ubuntu, he went in detail through the code of a simple program to talk to a user’s personal Ubuntu One file storage area. We liked Michael’s session so much that it will very soon be featured as a tutorial on developer.ubuntu.com!

Publishing Your Apps in the Software Center: The Business Side

Ubuntu directly benefits from Canonical becoming a sustainable business to support its development, and that’s exactly what John talked about. Being responsible for business development in the Ubuntu Software Centre, he’s got a privileged insight on how to make it happen. He started off explaining that the main goal is to present Ubuntu users with a large catalog of apps available for purchase, and then continued concentrating on how to submit paid applications to be published in the Software Centre. A simple 5-step process, the behind-the-scenes work can be summarized in: Canonical helps packaging the app, it hosts the app and provides the payment via pay.ubuntu.com, in a 80%/20% split. Other highlights include the facts that only non-DRM, non-licensed apps cannot be submitted right now, but there is ongoing work to implement license key support, and that MyApps, the online app submission portal, can take any nearly any content: apps with adverts, “free” online game clients and HTML5 apps.

Writing an App with Go

Gustavo’s enthusiasm for Go, the new programming language created by Google shows every time you start a conversation with him on that topic. And it showed as well on this session, in which he created yet another “Hello world” application in a new language -you guessed-: Go. Along the way, he had time to describe all of the features of this new addition of the extensive family of programming languages: statically compiled with good reflection capabilities, structural typing, interfaces and more.

Qt Quick At A Pace

Closing the week on the last -and surprise- session, we had the luxury of having Donald, from the Nokia Qt team, the makers of Qt itself, to talk about Qt Quick. Using a clear and concise definition, Qt Quick is an umbrella term used to refer to QML and its associated tooling; QML being a declarative markup language with tight bindings to Javascript. A technology equally suited to mobile or to the desktop, QML enables developers to rapidly create animation-rich, pixmap-oriented UIs. Through the qtmediahub and Qt tutorial examples, he explored QML’s capabilities and offered good practices for succesfully developing QML-based projects.

Wrapping Up

Finally, if you’ve got any feedback on UADW, on how to make it better, things you enjoyed or things you believe should be improved, your comments will be very appreciated and useful to tailor this event to your needs.

Thanks a lot for participating. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did, and see you again in 6 months time for another week full with app development goodness!

Ubuntu App Developer Week – Day 4 Summary

Creating an App Developer Website: developer.ubuntu.com

Creating the concept and implementing a site for app developers is no easy task. The Ubuntu App Developer site is meant to be a place for app authors to get started with development, to find the information they need and to be able to publish their apps in the Software Centre. John explained all the research and user testing that happened behind the scenes, highlighting the key findings, while David focused on the purpose of the site, where it fits in the overall developer strategy for Ubuntu and the plans for the future.

Rapid App Development with Quickly

Fitting nicely topicwise with the questions about the default choice of tools for Ubuntu development on the previous session, Michael gave an overview of what Quickly is and how to use it. Going through the workflow of creating your first app with Quickly, he demonstrated all the key commands and explained in detail all the bits in between.

Developing with Freeform Design Surfaces: GooCanvas and PyGame

Rick started off the session explaining what GooCanvas and PyGame were good for: providing a 2D surface on which to construct interactive GUIs for users. Beginning with GooCanvas, he showed with a very simple example how to get started playing with 2D composing surfaces, adding images, text and doing other operations such as resizing and calculating coordinates to determine clicks. Next up was PyGame, for the same purpose, but better suited for apps with lots of animation updates without user input. He then wrapped up with three samples of simple games to study.

Making your app appear in the Indicators

Ted Gould, the man who controls the upper right corner of our screen, talked all about indicators. The idea was to illustrate how to get the information that comes from applications and handle it to the indicators. First up was the messaging menu, a menu to handle human-to-human communication, next the application indicators, which alllow long-running apps to put statuses on the panel consistently, and finally the sound indicator, taking care of all related to sound. Each one of them explained with code examples. Nice!

Will it Blend? Python Libraries for Desktop Integration

Marcelo shared his experience acquired with Polly, a Twitter client he developed, on using Python and libraries to let apps provide better integration to the desktop. First explaining the concept of desktop integration, stressing the fact that it’s not only about visuals. The rest of the session was structured around 3 main areas: how to send notifications to the user, where to place files read or written by an app and what to use to store sensitive information. A very clear and solid session, also with example code for easy learning.

The Day Ahead: Upcoming Sessions for Day 4

Multitouch is everywhere these days, and now on your desktop as well -brought to you by developers such as Jussi Pakkanen, who’ll guide through using libgrip to add touch support to your GTK+ apps. Learn how to use this cool new library in your own software!

Lenses are ways of presenting data coming from different sources in Unity. Neil Patel knows Lenses inside out and will present a practical example of how to create a Google Docs one. Don’t miss this session on how to put two cool technologies together!

Yet again the Deja-dup rockstar and UADW regular Michael Terry will be sharing his deep knowledge on developing apps. This time it’s about adding cloud support to applications: integrating with the Ubuntu One files API.

19:00 UTC – Publishing Your Apps in the Software Center: The Business Side

Closing the series of sessions around publishing apps in the Software Centre, we’ll have the luxury of having John Pugh, from the team that brings you commercial apps into the Software Centre and who’ll be talking about the business side of things.

Go is the coolest kid around in the world of programming languages. Gustavo Niemeyer is very excited about it and will be showing you how to write an app using this language from Google. Be warned, his enthusiasm is contagious!

A last minute and very welcome addition to the schedule. In his session Donald Carr will introduce you to Qt Quick to create applications with Qt Creator and QML, the new declarative language that brings together designers and developers.

Ubuntu App Developer Week – Day 3 Summary

Unity Mail: Webmail Notification on Your Desktop

Starting off with a description of the features of Unity Mail, such as displaying webmail unread message count, notifications and mail subjects, we then learned more about how it was developed and the technologies that were used to create it. It’s written in Python, using GObject introspection (PyGI) and integrates with Ubuntu through the Unity, Notify and Indicate modules. After describing each one in more detail, Dmitry continued talking about how the app can be translated using Launchpad, and how he uses the Bazaar source revision control system to work with code history. Wrapping up, he went through the plans for the future: more configuration options, marking all messages as read and the need for a new icon. Any takers?

Launchpad Daily Builds and Rapid Feedback: Writing Recipe Builds

Assuming some previous knowledge on Debian packaging, in his session Jelmer walked the audience through a practical example of a basic recipe build for a small project: pydoctor. Drawing the cooking recipe analogy, package recipes are a description of the ingredients (source code branches) and how to put them together, ending up with a delicious Debian package for users to enjoy. Launchpad can build packages from recipes once or automatically on a daily basis provided the code has changed, conveniently placing the result in a PPA. In the last part of the session, he described in detail the contents of an existing recipe and added some notes on best practices when building from a recipe.

Using the Ubuntu One APIs for Your Apps: An Overview

The idea bahind the Ubuntu One developer programme is to make it easy to add the cloud to your apps and make new apps for the cloud. With this opening line, Stuart delivered a talk about a high-level overview on the cool things you can do as an app developer adding Ubuntu One support. One aspect it data: for example building applications that work on the desktop, on mobile phones and on the web, securely sharing data among users. Another is music: streaming, streaming music and sharing playlists on the desktop, on mobile and from the web, all through a simple REST HTTP API. He also mentioned some examples of cloud enabled applications: Shutter and Deja-Dup, and many other interesting ways to use Ubuntu One to do exciting thigs with data. And you can get started already using the available documentation.

Supercharging Your Apps with Unity Launcher Integration

In his talk, Jason first went through the terminology that covers the elements related to the Unity Launcher, and the bachground behind the Launcher API, implemented in the libunity library. Libunity can be used in many programming languages: Python, C, Vala and others supported by GObject Introspection. Going through what you can do with the Launcher (marking/unmarking apps as urgent, setting object counts, setting progress on objects and adding quicklist menu items to the object), he used Vala snippets to illustrate each feature with code.

Hello Vala: An Introduction to the Vala Language

Vala, a new programming language with C#-like syntax that compiles to C and targets the GObject type system: with a clear statement of what Vala is and what it can do, Luca, a contributor to the project introduced one by one the mostkey features of the language through his “Hello world” example: namespaces, types, classes, properties, keywords and more. As a highlight he mentioned Vala’s automatic memory management using reference counting, andits interoperability with other languages, most notably C, but it can also work with many others supported by GObject Introspection. Other cool featuresto note were also error handling on top of GError, support for async operations, closures and DBus client/server, on each of which he elaborated before finishing the session.

The Day Ahead: Upcoming Sessions for Day 3

Ubuntu 11.10 will not only bring new features to the OS itself. In time for the release we’ll be launching the new Ubuntu App Developer site, a place for developers to find all the infromation and the resources they need to get started creating, submitting and publishing their apps in Ubuntu. John Oxton, David Planella and many other people have worked to make the next developer.ubuntu.com possible and will tell you all about it.

Quickly is a wrapper that pulls together all the recommended tools and technologies to bring apps from creation and through their whole life cycle in Ubuntu. With an easy set of commands that hide all the complexity for your, it effectively enables developers to follow rapid development principles and worry only about writing code. Michael Terry, from the Quickly development team will be looking forward to guide you through the first steps with this awesome tool.

Have you ever wondered what freeform design surfaces, or canvases are? You probably have now. Well, lucky you then, because Rick Spencer will be here to tell you what they’re good for and how to get started with them

In another session on how to integrate with the platform, Ted Gould, the man who knows most about them, will describe how to add indicator features to your apps, both in terms of panel indicators and messaging menu support.

You certainly will want your app to have that familiar look and feel at home in the OS it’s running on, but you’ll also want it to use all the backend technologies to integrate even deeper and provide a great user experience. Well, fear not, for Marcelo Hashimoto is here to tell you exactly how to do that!

Ubuntu App Developer Week – Day 2 Summary

Making Your App Speak Languages with Launchpad Translations

In this session we learned how to link up an app that already has internationalization support to Launchpad Translations, so that it is exposed to Launchpad’s extensive community of translators who’ll effectively make your app speak almost any language. From setting up code hosting for a seamless integration, to setting up the translations settings to tips and tricks for best practices, the presentation should give developers a good grasp of how to start getting their apps translated and ready to reach a wider audience.

The Making of Unity 2D

An interactive and popular session, in which Florian started describing the main goal behind the Unity 2D project: to run on platforms that do not provide accelerated OpenGL. It essentially is an implementation of the main Unity user interface using the Qt toolkit and the QML declarative language, while reusing the backend technologies from Unity. From there he went on describing the Unity 2D architecture and the release policy, pointing out to the Unity 2D daily PPA, for those testers who want to be on the bleeding edge., and wrapped up answering the questions from the audience.

Making App Development Easy: Gedit Developer Plugins

Starting off with a description of Gedit plugins, their purpose and how to install them, Curtis delved into the general-purpose plugins and the developer plugins (click to install) plugins, explaining how to set them up and his recommended choice of plugins to convert Gedit in the perfect programming editor. The highlights included the GDP Bazaar integration plug in, which allows working with the bzr source revision control system and others (Subversion, Mercurial, Git), as well as the Source Code Browser plugin, a class and function browser based on Exuberant Ctags.

Publishing Your Apps in the Software Center: The MyApps Portal

In another session devoted to the app developer strategy, Anthony told us all about the MyApps webapp developers can use to submit their applications to the Software Center. Available on https://myapps.developer.ubuntu.com, it started off as the need to automate the submission of commercial apps to the Software Centre, expanding to a full-blown online portal that can now tackle any type of submission. He then walked the audience through the 5-step process to send an app for review, including all the necessary metadata and payment details. Once an app has been submitted, it needs to be packaged (if it wasn’t already) and reviewed before being published. Hinting to Jonathan Lange’s session on day 1, Anthony explained that they are looking at providing an automated process for packaging, with the intention of removing the last big remaining manual process.

Publishing Your Apps in the Software Center: The App Review Board

Complementing the previous session, Stéphane explained how libre+gratis apps can get into the Software Centre and what the App Review Board’s (ARB) role is in that process. He focused on how the Board reviews applications and how other types are distributed in Ubuntu. The types of apps reviewed by the ARB are small, lightweight apps, usually of the type created by Quickly (check out the sessions on Quickly on Thursday!). The next upcoming changes in the way this applications are reviewed will most probably include them being submitted through the MyApps online portal and them being made more secure by wrapping them in a container based on AppArmor or Arkose (or a combination of them).

The Day Ahead: Upcoming Sessions for Day 3

We’re starting to see more and more apps that integrate with Unity. Unity Mail is a cool app that allows you to stay up to date with your web mail directly from your desktop. It supports any IMAP server, but right now it works best with Gmail, along with notifications, message counts, quicklists and more. Dmitry Shachnev will tell us about its features and how he put the application together.

Launchpad has many awesome features. This time around Jelmer Vernooij will be explaininghow to set up recipe builds for your project in Launchpad, so that users can get the latest updates easily packaged on a daily basis, so that they can install them at a click of a button and can test them and make the feedback loop as short as possible.

Ubuntu One is starting to be everywhere, and it even has its own developer programme. The Ubuntu One website already provides lots of information to developers, and to make it even more clear, Stuart Langridge will walk you through the available Ubuntu One APIs you can use to make your application cloud-ready.

One of the easiest and more visual ways for your apps to blend in with Unity is for it to integrate with the Launcher. Counts, progress indication, quicklists… are an elegant and simple wayto provide feedback to users. Jason Smith knows all about Launcher integration, and he’s really looking forward to share it with us!

Vala is a powerful programming language that allows modern programming techniques to be used to write applications that run on the GNOME runtime libraries, particularly GLib and GObject. Luca Bruno is part of the team that develops Vala itself, and will be introducing us to the first steps to get started with Vala with the universal “Hello world” app becoming “Hello Vala!”.

Making Ubuntu a Target for App Developers

Jono, who has recently started working on the Ubuntu developer programme after having been developing and defining the strategy on Launchpad for the last 5 years, started off explaining that to cross the chasm and to get our OS from 20 million to 200 million users, we need more and better apps on Ubuntu. There are some key aspects to this goal, coinciding with areas of ongoing work:

A place – making some place that app developers can go to in order to learn how to develop for Ubuntu (developer.ubuntu.com)

A definition – defining a platform for developers to target

A channel – a smooth, short, safe path from developers to their users and back again (the Ubuntu Software Centre and MyApps)

After expanding on the subjects of automatic packaging and security, the conclusion is that with all of these pieces in place -Software Centre, developer portal, a defined platform, automagic packaging, safe mechanisms for distributing new apps & paying developers- then Ubuntu becomes something that developers can seriously start to target

Introducing Bazaar Explorer: Version Control for your Apps

“Bazaar is the world’s finest revision control system” – an awesome quote to start an equally awesome session. With this, and with the idea that Bazaar needs to be available to anyone, not only to those already comfortable with the command line, Jonathan Riddell provided a tour of the most feature-rich GUI for Bazaar. Illustrating the most common commands for everyday use and with plenty of pictures, he provided an excellent overview of how this powerful, cross-platform, graphical interface for bzr can make life much easier to app developers.

Your App & Launchpad best practices

Jason’s session on how to make the best use of Launchpad, the online collaboration and hosting suite for your projects, was structured around 3 central points: 1. Why should you host your project in Launchpad? To which his answer was: because PPAs, daily builds and lots of users; 2. How to set up your app to use Launchpad, where he guided participants through the process of creating a Launchpad project and offering some insights on best practices. Finally, on 3. Using Launchpad to engage developers he wrapped up with a series of recommendations and tips to ease and foster contributions to your project. More on the session log

Getting Started With Python: a Hello World App

As a grand finale to the day, Alan delivered a beginner-friendly session on the basics of the Python programming language. Assuming no prior knowledge, he walked participants through the classical “Hello world” example in Python, which universally greets programming novices on the terminal with a friendly welcome message. Along the way, he explained in detail all the extra bits to make this simple application run and be useful as a kickstart to becoming a full-blown Python programmer.

The Day Ahead: Upcoming Sessions for Day 2

Did you know that along with code hosting, release management, bug tracking and support, you can also use Launchpad to get your app translated?. David Planella will explain you how to set up your app in Launchpad for translations and give you some advice on building a translator community around it.

Unity needs to run on every type of desktop, from those with powerful 3D graphics processors to those only able to run in 2D. Unity 2D was born out of the need to provide a near identical experience as its 3D counterpart on systems which cannot rely on 3D graphical processing, such as ARM computers. Florian Boucault will talk about what Unity 2D is, how it was designed, and the technologies used to implement it.

Gedit is Ubuntu’s lightweight yet powerful default text editor. Its flexible plugin architecture means that it can easily be extended to meet any need. Curtis Hovey will guide you through his Gedit Developer Plugins to help you convert a general-purpose editor into the perfect programming editor.

Canonical is taking app developers very seriously,and one of the important aspects of ensuring a smooth workflow for submitting and publishing applications into the Ubuntu Software Centre is providing the right set of tools. Anthony Lenton will tell you the story behind the MyApps tool and how app authors can use it to submit their apps.

If you are an open source developer and want to publish your libre + gratis app into the Ubuntu Software Centre, the App Review Board (ARB) will take care of reviewing it, ensuring it is up to the Ubuntu standards and help you publishing it for all users to install. Stéphane Graber is a member of the ARB and will explain how the Board works and the steps to successfully submit an app for review.

Kicking Off Ubuntu App Developer Week

The Ubuntu App Developer Week is starting today, so get ready for an awesome week full of exciting sessions and great speakers around the topic of application development in Ubuntu.

Here’s a taster of what’s in store today:

16:00 UTC – Making Ubuntu a Target for App Developers

Jono Lange will open the week explaining the strategy for app development in Ubuntu, telling us more about the latest developments and what we’re going to see in the next future. Make sure you’ve got all your questions lined up, as it will be a really interesting subject and Jono will be more than happy to answer them!

Bazaar is a tool to track history of your code revisions and make it easy to distributed teams to collaborate developing code. But it’s not all about the command line. Jonathan Riddell will show you how to use the graphical tools to help you being more productive with Bazaar.

18:00 UTC – Your App & Launchpad best practices

If you’re using Launchpad, the suite of collaborative online tools to manage your project (and you should ) Jason DeRose will go through the best practices and all the tips and tricks to make sure you make the most of it for your project.

19:00 UTC – Getting Started With Python: a Hello World App

Do you want to write your first lines of code in Python and need some help? Then no worries, Alan Bell will be here to guide you through the easy journey of writing a simple “Hello world” application in this cool and powerful programming language.

Joining The Week

Getting involved is simple. You can connect using any IRC client or your browser. Simply go to:

Ubuntu App Developer Week

Ubuntu App Developer Week is a week of sessions aimed at enabling and inspiring developers to write applications that scratch their itches. Our goal is to give all attendees a taste of the wide variety of tools on the Ubuntu platform that can be used to create awesome applications, and to showcase some applications that have been created and explain how they were put together.

The Sessions

The whole week is packed with interesting subjects, aimed both at new and experienced developers. During the sessions you’ll get a solid overview on a broad range of the Free Software technologies that will enable you to create your applications in Ubuntu. At the same time, you’ll be able to chat and ask your questions directly to the true rockstars on those subjects.

Making Ubuntu a Choice for App Developers

We want to put Ubuntu on the app development map. We want to provide a top level experience through a platform that makes it easy for developers to create applications and distribute them to millions.

The Ubuntu Software Centre provided a solid foundation and a springboard to the proliferation of an ecosystem of resources and projects aligned to deliver this vision. Matthew Paul Thomas and Evan Dandrea already layed out the path at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando in 2010, and we’re seeing more and more news related to the work we’re doing while making this happen:

Having gone through the process of distributing our game on the SC, I must say that Canonical has created a fantastic digital distribution toolset. BEEP was pushed through their web-based deployment toolset with no fuss at all. Deploying paid software in Ubuntu is now a no-brainer.

Next is developer.ubuntu.com, a place to present developers a clear journey that will guide them through the process of creating and publishing applications for Ubuntu. Along the way, they will find all the resources that will enable them to make the right design decisions and direct them to the information they need in a consistent manner. The site will also be the starting poing for building an app developer community.

You Can Help: Participate in The Ubuntu App Developer Survey

We’re at a point in the design of developer.ubuntu.com where we’d like to have some feedback to help us make and validate some of the decisions to provide the best user experience for developers. For this, we’ve prepared a short survey to get some input in the key areas we’re interested in.

So if you are intending to develop apps in the future, here’s your chance to contribute to making Ubuntu thrive in the world of apps: we’d really value your feedback by taking part in the Ubuntu App Developer Survey.

We would appreciate if you could complete the survey by Friday, 19th August 2011. Remember that this survey is not only aimed at existing or new Ubuntu developers, but also at people coming from other platforms, so it would be really helpful if you could share this link with anyone you know who might be developing in those other platforms.